Life Or Death: The Case For Black America Voting Hard Against The MAGA Cult On Nov. 6

“The Negroes still don’t understand the power of the ballot in the North. We must make them understand that the Negro voters have it in their power to decide next November whether Johnson stays in the White House or goes back to his Texas cotton patch.” — Malcolm X, March 9, 1964

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 20: Andrew GillumJamarlin talks to Andrew Gillum, mayor of Tallahassee and leading Democratic candidate for Florida governor. They discuss the DNC taking the Black vote for granted, its silence on the killing of 60 Palestinian protestors, and whether big tech and Silicon Valley elites can be regulated at the state level.

I know many of us are extremely frustrated with the Democratic Party but we must vote hard against MAGA on Tuesday.

The leading experts in America mispriced the risks leading up to the financial crisis in 2008. We have the opportunity to properly assess the risks associated with MAGA gaining more power in America. MAGA’s open and unchecked white supremacy is out of control and we have the power to check it with our vote on Tuesday.

The battle for Congress is close. In the House, the Democrats are at an advantage. Dems need to pick up 23 seats to win control, according to a ratings analysis from the Cook Political Report. However, the Senate leans Republican. To keep control, the GOP can’t lose more than one seat. It’s far from a done deal.

Nearly 32 years ago, the state of Alabama rejected the nomination of Jeff Sessions for federal judgeship. They thought he was too racist — even for Alabama. Sessions was strategically selected as attorney general as a signal to the MAGA base that Donald Trump is “one of them.” Promoting the racist birther conspiracy about Barack Obama or the build-the-wall theme also signaled to white supremacists that Trump is one of them.

How bad could America get if the MAGA cult is able to stay in power unchecked?

In 2008, the leading economists and risk managers in the U.S. were caught off guard by the risks that subprime mortgages and bonds posed to the economy.

Because of this mispricing of risks, there was a heavy price to be paid by businesses, government, and homeowners. Several institutions had to die including Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and Countrywide. These institutions were severely punished for not foreseeing what could go wrong if their assumptions turned out to be wrong. American homeowners were also punished for mispricing the risk of a collapse in home prices after so many years of strong gains during a bull market.

We needn’t look at MAGA by what its followers have done so far but rather what is possible with a cult leader who says people will follow him, even if he shoots someone dead in the street.

How does Black America assess the risk profile of an openly racist cult leader? How seriously should we take this threat now?

Black America cannot be complacent with risks related to MAGA and the white supremacists who support Trump. MAGA represents a degree and frequency of white supremacy that poses massive risks to Black America. We can see risks building up in the system.

For example, Trump’s MAGA cult has already stacked 60 judges in federal courts and two on the Supreme Court. Trump and Sessions know that MAGA needs to be institutionalized as much as possible while they are in power. Investors already knew what MAGA was about when Trump was elected. This is why private prison stocks went up more than 100 percent. MAGA is good business for the prison industrial complex.

Supporting Trump has ALWAYS been deeper than Republicans vs. Democrats. Trump as a “leader” openly willing to do his job as a white supremacist transcends political party ties, geographic loyalties, and gender unity. Trump has folks snorting uncut and raw lines of whiteness.

MAGA’s open and radicalized support for institutionalized white supremacy puts this midterm election beyond traditional Democrat and Republican categories. It is not business as usual.

Whatever issues we have with the Democratic Party — and I have plenty of them — they need to be handled on the other side after midterms. Under MAGA, you can expect more white folks to become more radicalized and shoot innocent Black people down like dogs, like the MAGA shooter in Kentucky did a few weeks ago. It is a mistake for some pro-MAGA Black folks to think the racism against our brown brothers or Muslim brothers won’t be directed at them more openly at a later date.

You are a fool if you think an attack on birthright citizenship couldn’t be a dry run or precursor for other attacks on the Constitution. The twin goals of the MAGA cult are to take more power and reduce constitutional rights of non-whites.

Trump argues that it’s not necessary to amend the Constitution to end birthright citizenship. He says he can end it with an executive order or with congressional legislation.

“The people around Trump, and the Republicans in Washington, absolutely kowtow to him, either out of fear they’re going to anger him, or out of adulation. That behavior is very typical of a cult.” — Janja Lalich, scholar and author who has studied cults extensively

Fifty percent of Republicans said they could potentially postpone the 2020 election if they cooked up charges of rampant voter fraud, according to a poll conducted by the Washington Post in 2017. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has predicted that Trump is going to suspend the U.S. Constitution:

Wilentz implied that Donald Trump just might decide to suspend the Constitution if he is elected president in November. ‘If (Trump) becomes president will he be able to do everything he says he’s going to do?’ asks Wilentz. ‘No. We do still have a Constitution.’ Wilentz then casually fantasizes that Trump could decide to suspend the Constitution in an act of Caesarism.

‘Then we have a crisis like we’ve never faced as a country before except possibly in the case of session in 1861, says Wilentz, the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at the Ivy League university. ‘That was a constitutional crisis that ended up with 750,000 military dead. I don’t want to go through that again.’